Strangerland

"The native desert is large character in Australian movies," says star Hugo Weaving about Kim Farrant's freshman film, "Strangerland." "The land is a giver and a taker," he adds in "The Story" Blu-ray featurette. "It's beautiful and perilous."

Weaving plays defeated Detective David Rae, who impotently assists alienated couple, Aussie housewife Catherine (Nicole Kidman) and "isolated, judgmental and withholding" British pharmacist husband Matthew Parker (Joseph Fiennes), when their two children vanish in a community-choking red dust storm.

The pair and their two children had recently relocated from Canberra, where their 15-year-old daughter Lily (Maddison Brown) and her Lolita tendencies forced them to leave because of her sexual relationship with a teacher. Younger brother Tom (Nicholas Hamilton) has trouble sleeping, so he often wanders their new backwater town alone at night.

The Nathgari townspeople reluctantly join in the search for the kids, yet start to blame Lily's forthright sexuality for the disappearance as well as Matthew's temper plus Catherine and Tom's plain oddness.

The premise is intriguing: how an estranged family is forced to find a way to work together when fear and tragedy strike, yet Fiona Seres and Michael Kinirons' "dark and unrelenting" script - which Farrant worked to bring to the screen for 11 years - goes off the rails with unexplained sexual impropriety from mom and one long, monotone angsty reaction from dad.

The Blu-ray extras offer more range of emotional sense. Fiennes raves about working with Weaving and his "brilliant intellect and emotional antennae," and Weaving relates he feels that the entire film is about intimacy.

"There's clever, delicate relationships between male and female psyches," adds Weaving the trilogy-maker.

"Strangerland" is Kidman's first Australian film since 1989's "Dead Calm," and she chews the scenery and her fraught, middle class character with her usual intensity. But it doesn't make this land any less strange.

"Strangerland"
Blu-ray
$14.99
http://www.wildbunch.biz/movie/strangerland/